Friday the 13th Part II - Bye Bye, Sweet Alice

So I knew after “The Burning” on Monday I would be in 1981 just for a bit. I hadn’t realized—or perhaps just forgot—the glutton of slashers in this year alone. A lot of slasher productions were looking to capitalize on “Friday the 13^th” (1980). I have a few slashers I noticed on the DVD shelf that I will include as “extras” while moving through the Jason series. I set aside “The Prowler” but then I noticed “Happy Birthday to Me”, so I’ll see. At the present, I was mulling over the decision in “Friday the 13^th Part II” to discard Alice (Adrienne King) and move the series forward with Jason ridding himself of the murderer of his mother. I understand Savini’s annoyance with bringing Jason Voorhees into the fold as the next murderer in line to keep milking this fresh, popular cashcow. Jason was dead. In fact, what happened to Alice at the end of the first film was more of a nightmare that Alice felt was all too real…so real that she questioned if the sheriff and his police found Jason at Crystal Lake. But that’s quite a stretch from a Carrie-style jump scare nightmare to a sack-headed wilderness hermit seeking to cleanse the New Jersey environs of any camp counselor (or intruder to his neck of the woods). Nonetheless, the cat was out of the bag and had the claws to sink into the cow for an entire decade of Paramount releases. King got about 14 minutes (some of which was footage from the first film to save a little bit of funds and remind fans of just what Alice went through with Pamela Voorhees) in the opening, at least. Her surviving the trauma of her experience would be short-lived as Jason found her somehow (the logic monster roars aloud as we wonder how Jason accomplished this, but I digress…). A head in the refrigerator and a screwdriver to the skull…Bye, bye, Alice.